1. Apparently, the contrived acronyms WILL NOT STOP. The latest offender comes from An Introduction to Sociolinguistics(Fifth Edition) by Ronald Wardhaugh—how cool is my reading list, right? The acronym that Dell Hymes coined in 1974 to refer to his ethnographic model of the various factors involved in speaking is, wait for it…

2. I just watched last night’s episode of “Ru Paul’s Drag Race,” and I have just this to say: I am SO rooting for Ongina (go girl!); one of Ru Paul’s best quotes this epi was, in regards to Jade’s botched tuck, “There’s still a lot of snakes on this motherfuckin’ PLANE!”; and that, I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS DRESS, and it would make my LIFE if I could get my hands on it:

(This fringed brilliance extends, in layers, all the way to the floor. Yes.)

By now it’s abundantly clear that I take issue with lame contrived acronyms. I spotted another one on a campus bulleitin board today, and while there’s little doubt that it was engineered to be clever, its cheekiness makes me sort of want to throw this one a bone. The culprit?

Many posts ago, I mentioned my distaste for contrived acronyms, such as Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation solar panel program known as FIRST. I just came across another painful example out of Berkeley’s Malcolm X Elementary School (you read that right). Their after-school program is titled, wait for it, Berkeley L.E.A.R.N.S! No word on what it stands for, but really, it doesn’t matter.

In this scenario, IS AN ACRONYM REALLY NECESSARY?!! Contrived acronyms are one thing—yeah, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation solar panel financing program (which I totally support, btw) is acronymed as Berkeley F.I.R.S.T: Financing Initiative for Renewable and Solar Technology—but to contrive something so unimaginatively that the only thing you can come up includes the acronym IN the acronym?? This is so meta it’s painful.

A random factoid: for those of us who’ve taken even basic Spanish classes in school and learned that the Spanish word for the United States, Estados Unidos, is abbreviated EE.UU—did you know that the doubled letters indicate that the words referenced by the initials are plural? Neither did I, until I randomly read the Wikipedia article on initialisms yesterday. Turns out that some languages, though usually not English, deal with the issue of “how do we indicate that this acronym is plural and not singular” by doubling the letters that indicate each word. There is a little bit of this convention in English—as the article mentions, “p.” means “page” while “pp.” stands for “pages”—but for the most part, we get ourselves into ugly situations like choosing between DVD’s, D.V.D.’s, D.V.D.s, or DVDs. Personally, I prefer the last iteration (as well as the oxford comma!), but that’s just me.